By Janus Boye
Susan Weinschenk is the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff
Susan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology from way back when most people did not interact with a computer.
Back then, Susan also took a course in computer programming and these were the days with cards and card readers. One day, while programming, the card came back with ‘Job aborted’ and this made Susan think:
“How’s anyone going to understand what that means”
When speaking to Susan, this is the beginning of her interest in the field of what was then called human factors and designing tech to better fit us humans. Initially she didn’t know human factors in computers existed, but now many years later she can look back at a career that has taken her onwards in a field later known as man machine interaction, then it became known as usability and today simply referred to as user experience.
Susan is the CEO at The Team W, a services firm focused on behavioral science. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. She’s also our expert of the month.
A long career in human factors and UX
Susan started working as a human factors consultant back in 1985 (!) and consider herself lucky to have experienced so many critical moments in the field of UX. When she started there was just a handful of consultants focusing on it and she was among them. Asking her to look back is a welcome reminder of the major milestones that have advanced the field or as Susan puts it: “It’s been fun”.
Early in her career, the emerging industry realised that they needed to train more people and not have programmers do the human factors work. That was a big change - as she said:
“You can’t write code well and worry about the user experience at the same time”
Simply put: Asking the same person to do both, is going to fail.
Later she then shifted her focus to growing the emerging role and was firmly focused on training new usability professionals.
Then in the 80’s graphical user interfaces arrived in the 90’s the World Wide Web. Huge transitions with massive changes and then in this millennium onwards to mass market virtual reality as well as smaller screens, smartphones and tables.
OK, that was the past. Today, we live in turbulent times, and according to Susan, there are two big trends that are going on, or as she cautiously says with her experience, two trends that might be about to happen, that we perhaps should pay more attention to. Let’s start with the first one:
Quality of user interfaces are taking a nosedive
While Susan hoped that through all the training and advancement in the field of UX, we would continue to see the quality going up, unfortunately she’s experiencing the opposite:
Apps that are difficult, if not at all impossible, to use
Forms that simply make no sense
While the visual experience looks good, the actual user experience is horrible. More errors are being created, the quality of attention to the user experience is vanning and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
According to Susan, we have much work to do for user interactions to be more conversational, more gestural and more communicating like a human.
Susan actually highlighted what can go wrong back in 2006 sharing an example from a crowded Canadian government website:
There is no chunking here, there is not progressive disclosure. It’s just all the information thrown on the page all at once. The result? You don’t read it, you just leave.
Read more in his blog post: 100 Things You Should Know About People: #33: Bite-Sized Chunks Of Info Are Best.
Let’s move onto her second trend, which is also something that’s been brewing for a while:
If you are a UX designer, what are you going to do?
To quote Susan:
“If you do not plan on retiring within the next year, you need to figure out what you are going to do.“
According to Susan, the machine will be creating the user interfaces of tomorrow.
Specifically humans will not be going into Figma, making the button blue, typing in the word register and so on as is the UX routine today. This will be done by machines and if that’s what you do for a living, you are in trouble.
To quote Susan:
“Humans are superior to robots, machines and AI when it comes to feelings, emotions and enjoyment”
Her advice is to learn and or improve your skills and knowledge in behavioral science, envisioning, communicating and understanding emotions. UX research will be key. And in closing, Susan advices:
“Be sceptical: People are bad at predicting the future”
Learn more about Susan Weinschenk
Susan hosted a popular member call back in 2020 on the power of self stories to drive behavior. Back in 2017, she was also a special guest star in a peer group meeting in Copenhagen. This was an unscripted ask me anything kind of format, and one of the topics we covered was what really matters in a persona.
You can also connect with Susan on LinkedIn. The Team B blog is also a treasure trove of good stuff, including this post on 10 Best Psychology Books.